One Survivor
by Mere Anarchy
Summary: Uchiha Sasuke wasn't often instructed to destroy a whole village by his teacher, Orochimaru, but when he did he always left one survivor. There was probably a good reason behind this: he just couldn't figure out what that reason was.
1. Sasuke

He always left one survivor.

Perhaps it was the increasing number of missions Orochimaru was giving him to prepare for the approaching destruction of Konoha. Maybe it was just guilt. But lately, Sasuke had been thinking more and more about the fact that he always left one survivor, only one survivor. It was starting to torment him, slowly rotting away his insides like the blackened edges of a rose creeping inwards at the start of winter. He had to know _why_.

Murder, after all, was nothing new to him. Even as a genin back in his old village, he hadn't hesitated to kill.

_Except that once. Except for that one time when— _

A beautiful pink-haired girl flashed through his mind; he pushed her away. _Didn't he always?_ Now wasn't the time to reminisce. There was never time to reminisce, not for a missing-nin. Not when he was drenched in blood, _so much blood_, and he still hadn't completed Orochimaru's orders to destroy this little, though politically powerful, village.

But most importantly, he hadn't yet decided whom he would spare. There were only a few still alive amidst the carnage, mostly women and children crying next to the broken bodies of family members. Hn. . . stupid people. They were too weak to run from him, too numbed by the subtle moonlight and the cold expressions of the dead. _They were like he had been, the night of. . ._

A bitter, vaguely tortured smirk found it's way to his lips, cracking the blood that had caked on his pale cheeks. He glided through the carcasses like death, searching for something he didn't want to find.

_He saw her face as he killed them. _

Not the beautiful smile she once graced him with, nor the disappointed pout she wore when he rejected her. It was always tears, always crying. Often he remembered her as she was the night he left her peacefully unconscious on the road out of Konoha, and sometimes he saw her body crumpled with anguish as she mourned his 'death' at the Great Naruto Bridge. But the image that constantly found it's way to the front of his mind (_when he killed, always when he killed_) was that ridiculous little girl in the Forest of Death, bruised and bloody but so determined; hellbent, really, on stopping him. And stop him she did . . . that once.

He thought about it often, and he did now as he finished the killing (_blood spattering on the concrete; how he lusted to feel it on his lips and in his mouth and bathing other, more contraband places_). Why did he hesitate when she held him? Tch. . . annoying. And now, he could never slaughter without leaving one pathetic figure, prostrate on the ground and covered in their own blood, but alive. Mercifully alive.

It was perfectly reasonable, he supposed. After all, he himself had survived a massacre. _He_ had been singled out, 'spared.' It was natural to want others to bear the mark he had felt so acutely, _still felt acutely_. It was natural to want others out there who knew suffering, horrible suffering that never went away. Others who knew what it was to be alone.

And yet. . . it was so despicably _easy_ to blame everything on Itachi. His refusal to communicate, his lack of relationships– all byproducts of that horrible night when his family's blood ran in rivers and his brother just stood there and _laughed_, like it was the funniest thing in the world.

It was time to recognize that _Sasuke_ was the one in control. And to do that he had to look into deeper parts of his subconscious to find the roots of this. . . annoyance. So it was with dubious mental stability that he sat down amongst the bodies (_mothers, fathers, brothers_) to think things through.

_Deep breaths, Uchiha,_ he told himself. _Clear your filthy mind._

And, dammit, he was trying. But every time he settled down, every time he thought he was completely in control, another image of _her_ popped into his mind. This, though– this was different. Now her face held no tears. Only those eyes, only those beautiful eyes, shining with something like love, something that called out to him and—

It hit him then, like a ton of bricks. And he knew all at once, like his heart had always known and was just waiting for his brain to catch up. Every time he killed, he left a single survivor so that if he ever destroyed Konoha. . .

He would have an excuse to keep her alive.


	2. Sakura

A/N: I originally meant this story to be a one-shot. However, inspiration struck, and so here it is: _One Survivor_ Chapter Two. This is dedicated to Pocky Whore, who left me a REALLY long review (btw, I absolutely _cracked up_ when I read your penname- I love it) and CloeyMarie, who has reviewed all three of my stories. Also, CloeyMarie, you said you liked the way I used repetitive phrases in my KakaSaku story, and this repeats alot of phrases from the first chapter. For that reason, I suggest that ya'll reread the last chapter before you read this (that is, if you didn't just read it for the first time).

Ok, I'm going to shut up now.

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_Blood._ That was what she thought of when she saw her childhood crush for the first time in years. Blood and murder.

Sakura had been on a solo mission to heal the leader of an important nearby village. It was a coveted mission due to the political influence of the patient, but Sakura would've hurried to help even if the man was merely a poor farmer. For some reason, Sakura could never, ever turn away a person in need of healing.

When she arrived in the village it was dark and she was exhausted, but nothing could conceal the fact that something was wrong, very wrong. Her suspicions had been confirmed when she found that trail of slain civilians, a sight so imprinted in her mind she would never stop remembering. It was hard not to think about all the dreams that died that night, extinguished like the flickering flames of a candle, a candle that would never give light again. But Sakura was a ninja, no stranger to dead bodies and forgotten hope. So she kept going, trying to ignoring the sticky feel of blood on the bottoms of her sandals.

And then there he was, at the end of the trail. The man who haunted her dreams (not to mention nightmares), meditating so peacefully amidst the carnage it made her sick.

He didn't notice her arrival, or maybe he did. Even as a genin back in the village, Sakura had never been able to read Sasuke.

_Except that once. Except that one time when– _

It wasn't so ridiculous, she supposed, that they find each other under the moonlight. It was a full moon when he left her, after all. There had to be some connection between the two incidents. Sakura forgot what surrounded her for a moment and pondered the moon's presence, _their heartbeats seeming so singular in this place of death._

She hazily wondered (_like it wasn't really her thinking these thoughts but another person, a person millions of miles away_) how many people he had killed since he left. She saw a little girl out of the corner of her eyes, covered in blood and unconscious, but alive. Mercifully alive. _She is just like I was, the night of. . . _

Sakura remembered herself as a harmless little genin, knocked out cold on the bridge leaving Konoha; she pushed herself away. _Didn't she always?_ Medics had no time to reminisce; and this moment, drenched in blood, _so much blood_, was certainly no exception. There was nothing she could do for the dead, _and there were so many dead_, but she was sure she felt a pulse of chakra coming from that little girl, that little girl who looked so much like herself. _She had to save her, she had to do something. . . _

Sakura stumbled shakily over to where the girl was prostrate on the ground, and began her examination. As she checked over that frail little body, Sakura became increasingly frantic. There was something, _something_, wrong with this girl. Her body wasn't responding as it should to the chakra pouring out of Sakura's hands, hands that moved over the body unseeingly. Hands that moved faster, _faster_, until Sakura (_in a moment so horrible she could hardly stand it_) understood. She'd never seen this before, but she'd read about it and been repulsed. This was a condition in the brain caused by a powerful genjutsu, where the body is not dead, _not dead at all,_ but will never be able to live again normally. Every day, every second of the rest of this girl's existence would be plagued with suffering,_ horrible suffering that never went away_. Images would play and play again in her tortured mind, images of her family's death. But that wasn't even the worst of it. She wouldn't just waste away in the face of this cruelty; her body would literally force her to survive, even as she prayed for death with every breath. What a horrible, horrible way to be spared.

Sakura didn't notice when Sasuke finally opened his eyes. She didn't sense it when he rose smoothly to his feet and glided through the carcasses, so absorbed was she in the horrors of this little girl's fate. _This little girl who was so like herself. . . _

When he finally spoke, words flying out of his mouth with a will of their own, it took Sakura a minute to comprehend. "I don't know why I did it."

His voice, _so horribly quiet when all she wanted to do was scream_, was not much different than it was when he was a genin; deeper, perhaps. But she couldn't hear the screams of the people he had slaughtered in it, as she'd once imagined. It was just Sasuke. It was just a murderer.

Sasuke himself didn't know why he lied– he _knew_ why he did it, why he had done it countless times before, once every time he slaughtered. The reason was sitting right there, cringing at him as if he haunted her every night in dreams. And he smiled, _bitter, vaguely tortured_, and figured that was probably the case.

Sakura didn't look up at him, but she was painfully aware of his presence, and what it meant. She'd been ordered to kill him. All elite ninja of her village, really, had been instructed to fight to the death if they ever came across him, but she felt like the announcement had been a personal warning, sent directly to her. To anyone else, it was a given. See a traitor, kill him. For Sakura, though, it wasn't so clear-cut, so painfully obvious.

Because now, as she finally looked into his eyes, Sakura didn't see a traitor. What she saw was grey, like the cloudy skies that gave her hope. Grey skies that told her nothing is black and white, that she doesn't have to choose between loving Sasuke and betraying her village.

But Sakura could never watch cloudy skies for long, because soon enough it would start raining, and she couldn't handle the fact, _as the rain bathed her body in regrets and Sakura knew she wasn't made to smile_, that maybe she was deluding herself. It was the same with Sasuke's eyes. So she dragged her gaze back to the little girl's body, back to the horrible sanity hopelessness provides.

It wasn't long before Sakura's hands began to shake, it wasn't long before her eyes were so filled with tears they simply spilled over and ran down her cheeks like rain, _like delusion_.

"You're breaking me."

The first words out of her mouth weren't strong. They weren't spiteful, and they weren't meant to hurt her former teammate. But people seldom realize how dangerous broken things are, and shattered words are perhaps the most dangerous things of all.

Sasuke contemplated the pain those words (_so completely true, so completely honest_) gave him. He'd been numb for so long that emotional troubles were more surprising than harmful. He deserved every second of pain she could give him; so he whispered, "I know," (_voice harsh against the moonlight and Sakura's quivering form_) and waited for her to say more, to punish him in ways he could never punish himself.

But her next words were so unexpected he didn't even realize he'd gasped until it was too late to retract it.

"Thank you," she had said, so perfectly calm and collected he wondered if she was insane. And he knew he wouldn't like her answer, but he asked anyway. "For _what_?"

"Doing it gently."

Sasuke's eyes hardened as her words (spoken so simply he wasn't sure she was aware of what she was saying) sunk in. He didn't want to break her gently, he didn't want to break her at all. He was a murderer, this was true. But in the end, he wanted Sakura to be the one survivor. _Sakura was made to smile._

"Get up, Sakura," he ordered, voice hard and eyes no longer so grey-looking. "Get _up_."

The pink-haired ninja heard the authority in his voice and tried to pull herself off the ground. But how can a shattered vase glue itself back together? It was impossible, she knew. But that didn't stop her from trying, and it didn't stop the failure from stinging. Her eyes were wide with unvoiced panic as she murmured, "I _can't_."

There was a silence, and then he was in front of her, hands extended. "Not by yourself."

She took his arm and smiled (_smiled!_) as he pulled her out of that sea of blood, up where it was just both of them and the chilling moonlight. Maybe being broken wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe, _maybe_, they weren't so different in the end, the Medic and the Murderer. Because she never, ever turned away a person in need of healing so that if she ever got the chance. . .

She would have an excuse to save him.

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I hope you guys like it, because I spent an inordinate amount of time on it (3 hours for 3 pages, no joke). I kind of gave a different perspective on how Sasuke left one 'survivor'; I hope you guys all got what I was trying to say. I didn't really realizing I was down-playing Sakura as the reason he leaves one survivor until I read over it again, but it added another layer to the story so I kept it. Also, it turned out far angstier than I originally intended, so I tried to make the ending as light as I could without it seeming out of place. And I focused less on the 'excuse' part of Sakura's story and introduced a few other elements for more variety (plus I tried to make her seem sort of insecure without mentioning her forehead). If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Of the two, I like the first chapter the most because I think it flows better. This one is a little rough around the edges, and not written as well (I think), but I hope you enjoyed it. Drop me a line and tell me which chapter you preferred!

-Mere Anarchy


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